But also, yes, there was a significant, and at times excruciating, process that I went through in my relationship with my body and the stories that she’s been holding since girlhood about my worth and lovability.

That journey of tender but tenacious negotiation with my body has ultimately yielded the result of landing me here: open and available to experience a love like this after decades of longing, denial, unconscious sabotage, codependency, and armoring.

I have found that there is, in fact, a mappable, learnable somatic process for opening to Love. It’s the most courageous journey I’ve ever taken. And now I am really and truly living a life beyond my wildest dreams.

For so long, I did not have the capacity to imagine Love like this would ever find me.

Until it did.

And I get to marry him in 9 days.

We don’t have a traditional registry — we’re nearly 40 and have no need of crock pots and toasters. We have enough “stuff”.

But we are building a life, and have a larger vision for our home and family: a communal house as a center of life, and practice, in our village.

If my personal and professional path over the past ten years has been of value to you, and you would like to celebrate + thank me as I step into this next season, we created a cash registry for you to do so.

And we would both be inexpressibly grateful to receive that from you.

And I’m looking forward to sharing more about that mappable, learnable process for opening to Love. Whoever you are, no matter what you currently believe or feel to be true, it is for you. ❤️

Last night, we gathered near the river on the land of my teacher for connection, food, and song. A quintessential PNW summer night: chilly, drizzly, and peacefully still. Crowley’s final resting place within earshot of our laughter and singing. I felt so glad to be there, and just so grateful to be alive.

Today, we gather a little differently, but just as beautifully: Our monthly Full Moon Call begins at 2pm PST. I’m looking forward to dropping in and connecting with you all, considering I was off-grid during this time last month. There’s a lot stirring within me right now, that’s being illuminated by the themes of this moon:

• authenticity over belonging: where have I outgrown roles, communities, and identities, and what truth needs to be told about that?

• individuality + community: how do I fully express who I am, and how do my gifts contribute to something larger than myself?

• liberation from outdated patterns: where can I release habits, beliefs, or relationships that keep me tied to an old version of myself?

• power, truth, and transformation: what is my clearest emerging emotional truth regarding my relationship to control, and can it be negotiated with?

• innovation + future vision: how can I create the space in my body and mind to allow more breakthrough ideas, increasingly question old systems, and imagine new possibilities?

Basically: what version of myself is ready to die so that a more authentic (and impactful) one can emerge?

I’m excited to dive into all of this today with y’all… and, on theme to these questions, I’m intending to switch up the traditional “order of ceremonies” this month. Infusing our call with a little taste of Primal Practice (starting tomorrow! join us!) You’ll have to show up to find out exactly what that means. 😉

These monthly gatherings are open to paid subscribers, and I’ll be sending the email with the info to join about an hour before we meet. So there’s still time to upgrade and join us!

Real quick, up top:

1. The Refuge doors are officially OPEN! My signature three month online group mentorship where we rewild our animal bodies together through practices of movement, sound, and touch. Doors close until 2027 on August 1st, and it’s currently the only way to work with me directly (unless you want to join me for a retreat/ pilgrimage in October. More on that later). Learn more + enroll here!

2. Next week, July 27-July 31, I’m starting something brand new and completely FREE. It’s called Primal Practice. Five mornings (8am PST/ 11am EST) for one hour, we’ll gather (on zoom) and move, dance, play, sense, touch, etc. I’m doing this because I want to help you remember how to let your body be an animal again. Because that will absolutely change your life. Sign up here (make sure you check the box for Primal Practice + then follow the directions after you click submit)

I frequently struggle with marketing the things I create/ host/ offer, aka: describing the processes and outcomes in tangible, relatable language. And I think that’s because the processes and outcomes are so normal to me now that I have a hard time putting them into words. Like, how would a fish describe water?

It’s just true that I practice now more often than not. That my standard modes of operation through the world are more animal than industrialized. That moving in authentic, primal, intuitive, playful ways before I do almost anything else in the morning has become an integral part of who I am.

It has radically rearranged my personality structure, my mental and emotional landscape, and my somatic capacity.

Which has utterly transformed my relationships to love, money, work, self-responsibility, physical resilience, and creativity.

In ways that I have longed for and desired for years. And in a shockingly short amount of time.

Basically, I’m becoming the woman of my own dreams and it’s because of my practices.

My practices have healed and strengthened my relationship with my body more than any book I’ve ever read (or written), any therapy I’ve ever done, any course I’ve ever taken, and podcast I’ve ever listened to, or any pill I’ve ever swallowed.

At the beginning of this year, I launched The Refuge for the very first time. I didn’t totally know what I was doing yet, I just knew there were things I wanted to teach and I knew I wanted to bring people together. I knew I wanted to introduce people to the healing power of movement, sound, and touch. But I had no idea how it was all going to come together. I just knew my job was to create the container and show up with my full presence.

In order to do that, I anchored into (and ramped up!) my own practices. Practices that grounded me through launching this brand new thing, unlike anything else I’d done in 10 years of embodiment coaching.

Practices that held me through Crowley’s death, and shattering loss in my Nashville community.

Practices that fueled me through my very first ever five day solo 1:1 intensive with a client, and growing my bodywork practice here in Washington.

Practices that supported me through the most significant financial challenge of my relationship, and a sudden move for our family.

Practices that inspired a total rebirth of my business model, and the vision for my first ever retreat.

All while leading this group of 20 incredible people through The Refuge, and watching the unprecedented transformation unfold in their lives. Witnessing healing and supportive relationships build between them, and hearing from them how these teachings and practices were changing everything.

Basically, they were becoming the people of their own dreams and it’s because of their practices.

Why does it work? I mean, I could go on for ages about my beliefs re: the spiritual technology of the body. How when we learn to speak their language, that creates the secure attachment most of us weren’t able to fully experience in childhood. How the language(s) of the primal body aren’t words spoken and understood with the mind. The primal, animal body speaks movement, sound, and touch. And the primal, animal body is where all of your memories live. The deep down memories that inform your personality structure, your mental and emotional landscape, and your somatic capacity.

You are whoever it is you think you are only because of how you have been moving (or not), sounding (or not), and touched/ touching (or not) for a very long time.

And the good news is: it can all be played with. Changed. Healed. Grown. Repaired. Unwound. Rewired.

We just have to learn how to speak our body’s language.

That’s what we do in The Refuge.

This round is going to stretch edges, infuse safety, create connection, and explode vitality like never before.

I know that because that’s what my practices are doing for me right now.

So if you’re ready, join me here. If you have questions, ask them here.

And if you want to get a taste of what practice makes possible, sign up for Primal Practice here.

I can’t wait to practice with you. ❤️

There isn’t much that I know right now, but I know that today is a good day to move.

This weekend took an incredibly unexpected turn: an emergency room visit, more questions than answers, budding disappointment and some slightly confusing relief — and on more than one occasion (honestly, on steady repeat in my mind for the past 48 hours), I have felt overwhelmingly and indescribably grateful for my practices.

My practices of breath. My practices of movement.

My practices that invite me to develop capacity and resiliency beyond my previous (perceived) limitations.

My practices that encourage adaptability, flexibility, and the kind of strength my ancestors knew intimately, but that modern bodies have started to tragically forget.

My practices that make me remember.

Recently, I got my hopes up about something beautiful and exciting, something that seemed so obviously aligned in its potential. As I was freely allowing myself to feel the possibility and the premature satisfaction of the realized dream, Ty expressed concern: “What if it doesn’t happen?”

“Then I’ll feel that too.”

He seemed surprised at the simplicity of my answer, briefly searching for something underneath it. But my practices have taught me that I am safe to feel everything, that no feeling is final, and that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of because I cannot be created or destroyed by sensation.

Created or destroyed.

I can feel every ounce of hope and possibility because the unpredictable, uncontrollable unfoldings of life are not the foundation I am standing on.

I am rooted in the resilience of my body.

I am satisfied regardless of circumstance because satisfaction is an inside job, and I do not need one single thing to be difference so that I can feel better. Ever.

I didn’t read a book about this or learn it through understanding concepts or accumulating the appropriate cognitive beliefs.

I have practiced my way into this posture and I practice this posture every single day.

I can feel every ounce of the disappointment and confusion, the fear and the overwhelment, the sadness and the frustration because I practice this posture every single day.

“Posture” as a dynamic organizational system, not a static position. “Posture” as something that moves and breathes and opens and closes and opens up again. “Posture” as a disposition that is always always always telling the truth. “Posture” as an ever-changing expression of self-trust and safety: with my body, with life itself as it unfolds in my favor, and with the God of my understanding who holds it all together without need of my control, effort, or perfection.

Today is a good day to practice.

Today is a good day to move.

This morning, I’ll be dancing with my Open Floor community for the first time in a few weeks (thank God), and then I’ll be opening our room to dance and move and practice together. The playlist I’ve assembled this month is really special to me, as it’s been my companion through many of these recent ups and downs, openings and closings, and I’m so looking forward to sharing this time, and this practice, with you.

Dark Moon Dances are for paid subscribers, and you’ve still got time to upgrade if you want to join. I’ll send the link out within the hour before we gather.

My new mentor in the marriage of business and embodiment said this to me recently, after reflecting to me that my writing is often too polished to be as effective and compelling as it could be.

In my work, I talk a lot about our shapes and postures, and the lifelong underlying, unconscious patterns they reveal.

“Polished” and “precise” are two of mine that have been around for a loooong time. Especially in the realm of writing — what launched my career + built my public platform in the beginning was words, not images or videos of myself. Tweets. And photos of my tweets posted on instagram. And if I did ever let myself be seen in visual media, I was “polished” and “precise” (if you were around for the all-black-with-red-lipstick-era, you know what I’m talking about).

I even recorded the videos for my online course ABOUT EMBODIMENT sitting up perfectly straight in a chair, not a hair out of place, lipstick on, reading scripts from a teleprompter.

Bless her, she truly was doing her best.

But the game online has changed; and, more importantly, so have I. People don’t want to be told anymore; we want to, need to, are longing to be shown. I don’t want to tell anymore; I want to, need to, am longing to show.

To emit an unmistakable frequency that cannot be imitated by an LLM.

Because I’ve spent the past five years hiding, afraid of being seen. But I’ve opened up to the necessity (and joy!) of it because I’ve come to understand and accept that I am stewarding something radically transformative through my body.

A technology. A methodology. A revolution.

A way of being I began teaching when I launched The Refuge earlier this year. And I have to tell you: that first round only scratched the surface of what I’m here to transmit. And even still, there were astounding, permanent shifts in the lives of the people who participated.

Since finishing with that group in May, I have taken three more movement trainings and signed on with three new mentors. I’m leveling up to an unprecedented degree, and I’m starting to take the shape of someone willing to show, and not just tell, the metamorphosis that has occurred within me (through practices ANYONE can learn).

So you can see it, feel it, know it, want it as your own path.

The path of remembering your primal, vital, wild True Nature.

✨ Enrollment for The Refuge opens up again one month from today. This round is going to be like nothing I have ever done before. You can join the waitlist for early access, as space is intentionally limited to only 20 people.

🌿 And if you’re ready for a multi-day, immersive, in-person, communal experience, learning and practicing this way of being in your body, in one of the most gorgeous, serene, and revitalizing places on the planet… apply to join me in October at The Refuge Retreat — my brand new annual offering for resetting your nervous system and rewilding your life.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve been preparing for my workshop next week — teaching specifically about self-responsibility and my own life-changing journey with is for the very first time outside of a facilitation context.

But regardless of the exact cause, the effect has been that I have been catching myself, with legitimate surprise, in certain moments taking the shape of Play.

I’ve signed up for a summer fiction writing course taught by a friend here in town.

My group of friends and I have committed to routinely gathering for the exclusive purpose of playing improv games together.

I went vintage shopping in Vancouver yesterday with one of my best friends — an activity that has historically caused me to break a sweat simply at the thought of the overwhelm, and so I’ve rarely tried it at all and hadn’t attempted in at least ten years. You know (past) me… all black everything. I used to claim it was for the simplicity and ease. I’m willing and able to now honestly admit that it was because I have never really considered myself “creative” or “artistic”, and I was too afraid to try.

But it was a truly divinely aligned, totally stress free, completely timeless and perfect day. Somehow unfolding effortlessly in the middle of a city actively hosting a World Cup game. If we hadn’t already known, we never would have known.

The result of this adventure is that I have populated my wardrobe with a literal rainbow of color (except yellow — I have finally, after 38 years of denial, admitted that not a single shade of it looks good on me). But there’s red, red orange, orange, bright teal, royal blue, deep purple, white, pink… and yes, a couple of black things.

But in my defense: they’re silk.

Towards the end of the day, I changed into one of my newly bright and beloved pieces immediately after purchasing it — a vibrant orange, Italian-made, 100% cotton parachute skirt — and my friend Lyndsay reflected to me that my entire energy shifted once it was on my body: I started walking, talking, gesturing, carrying myself completely differently. Literally taking a new shape, the shape of Play, right before her eyes in an instant.

For the past ten years, I’ve been in the very serious business of “trauma” and “recovery” and I’ve got to tell you: it’s getting pretty boring. I’ve become much more interested in life. Vitality. Sensuality. Expression. Eroticism. Creativity.

How good it’s all actually supposed to feel.

How good it’s all actually supposed to be.

Two weeks ago, I woke up on the morning of our scheduled Full Moon Call so suddenly and unexpectedly nauseated I could barely move (that’s why you didn’t receive an email about a call that didn’t happen lol). It feels obvious to me now that whatever that was about had everything to do with that old version of myself finally being released.

And so, today, this Dark Moon Dance is a ritual for calling in who I am becoming.

Who you are becoming, who we are all becoming, individually and collectively. Because I know for a fact that it’s not just me feeling this way. Something is stirring inside so many of us, a great energetic shift is unfolding — throwing off the all-black grave clothes of the versions of ourselves we used to believe we needed to be in order to be “good”.

We are way more focused on being more than simply “recovered”.

We are way more focused on becoming radiant, satisfied, and free.

We are way more focused on where we’re going than where we’ve been.

If that’s you, if you’re with me (bright orange skirt and all), today’s dance is for you. I assembled the playlist so intentionally over the past two weeks, holding and communing with this potent, playful, emergent energy. Come and make it a ritual for calling in who you are becoming. I’d be so delighted to dance with you.

The link will go out to paid subscribers, per usual, within the hour before we gather. So you’ve still got plenty of time to upgrade and join us.

2. “Learning to take radical personal responsibility” is not just a concept to understand with your mind -- it is a disposition, a shape to take, a form to inhabit in your body. It’s a somatic skill.

3. Absolutely everyone can learn to cultivate this skill.

4. Absolutely everyone needs to learn to cultivate this skill.

5. Learning the skill of self responsibility feels threatening at first -- and that’s why most people don’t ever do it.

6. People who do learn the skill of self responsibility are the most happy, satisfied, well, and high performing people on the planet.

7. Cultivating this skill completely changed my life, and I am excellent at teaching people how to cultivate it for themselves.

8. One of my best friends worked with me last year, learned to cultivate this skill for herself, completely changed her life, and now she is also excellent at teaching people how to cultivate it for themselves.

9. We’ve created a new workshop together called “Personal Responsibility as a Healing Practice”.

10. Your life will completely change if you (truly) show up to it.

Lyndsay and I are hosting this workshop together for the very first time one week from tonight from 6:30- 8:30pm PST! You can also join us online if you’re not here in Bellingham. I am truly so thrilled to finally bring an offering like this to everyone who is courageous enough to walk this path. We’ll be engaging with breath, movement, sound, touch, teaching, integration, and communal reflection. It’s going to be incredible!

To register, click here to submit your $40 payment. Be sure to include your email address so we can reach out with the info on how to join us! Excited to see you there!

Yesterday, Ty and I went to an open house in the gorgeous forest-nestled home of a woman who died last month. One of her final wishes was for all of her belongings to be given away to anyone in the community who wanted or needed what she could no longer keep.

We arrived ten minutes after the official start time and it was already packed with people and pretty substantially cleared out — the energy was frenetic and hungry. Ty described it as “Sackville-Baggins energy”, so many people rushing around, eyes darting, suspicious of and guarded against one another, territorial in this tranquil space.

But we felt something so much slower, present, and satisfied in the home itself — very clearly the remaining energy of the former owner herself. We moved intentionally and found a few things to claim as our own, but mostly we just wanted to take our time getting to know this woman.

The man organizing the open house was the person who had helped her die, and as the place cleared out in a whirlwind we approached him and I asked him the question I had been wondering since we arrived: did she die here?

“Yes. In fact, right where we’re standing.” I thought so. I felt it. What else can you tell me about her? Alzheimers. Only 72. Lived her life in a very meticulous and ordered way, and didn’t want to end up warehoused for her final years and so she chose VSED — and got to end her life in a meticulous and ordered way.

“Not many people get to know the exact day they’re going to die”, he said. But she did. And on that day, she asked for a specific song to be sung (Remember Me from Coco), and as it finished, her face filled with an unprecedented ecstasy — just as this man had seen her husband’s face do a few years before — and she died.

The rest of the day, I felt her with me. Like she had something to say that I couldn’t quite understand. Until last night, while moving and flowing in deep practice in my studio, it broke through: death is ecstatic. Of course. Of course. Of course it is.

And that’s not a choice to make or a skill to develop, it’s just the natural way of things. And lately, I’ve been living in a manner of forgetting. Of clenching, resisting, terror over how my own disintegration, disillusion might feel.

But every death worker I know has told me the very same thing.

That at the moment when there is no more avoiding the inevitable, when the unstoppable force of entropy has taken over, every person, every body, does the exact same thing: they surrender. And they are filled with an unprecedented ecstasy.

Because death is meant to be ecstatic. That’s just the natural way of things.

I’ve been working on a different story lately, about how I feel myself finally beginning to integrate who I was during the first five years of my career + who I’ve been during the past five years of my career… but the most important piece of it blindsided me by clicking itself into place just last night. It happened when, while handwriting before bed, I struck gold at the totally unanticipated revelation that becoming a (step)mother is specifically and exactly what is responsible for initiating me into this integration in the first place.

How, yes, at times, I have held the acute feeling of losing, or being unable to find, myself. But the deeper Truth of the overall arc of it: that it has violently necessitated my willingness to venture into, excavate and understand, and, finally, allow to be healed and transformed by Love all of the places within myself that under or over function out of fear, insecurity, patterned smallness, unconscious defensiveness and reactivity, and deeply buried abandonment wounds.

The path of becoming a parent isn’t separate from the endeavor of self-actualization; it is the fullest expression of it.

I would not have believed this if someone had simply said it to me at any previous point in my originally fundamentally religious upbringing or my reactionary liberal feminist young adulthood. I had to take the journey, have the experience myself.

Simply: I have become increasingly unable to abide my own lies.

And that is directly and specifically because of the way in which my muted self-expression and my misalignment is so frighteningly and honestly mirrored back to me in and through the lives, behaviors, bodies, and words of my children. My children. Because that is what they are. At least, that is what they are becoming and what they will inevitably be. When I first entered into their lives and they entered into mine, that was not the case at all. And it would have been totally inappropriate for any of us to have pretended as if it was.

But after two years of this arrangement, how is it that I am meant to understand what has happened in me and in them, and the community and world around us, any other way? I am not an auntie, a bonus adult, or just some lady their father fell in love with who merely tolerates them at best. We live together, I love them, they are my sons. I am fiercely committed to the endeavor of getting them ready for the world — I have been since the beginning. And I am utterly uninvested in how they reference me, internally or externally, and especially what they call me.

I don’t need any kind of confirmation in form; I am completely confident in essence.

And that, right there, is the clearest window into what has happened to me through this technology of parenting. Because how you do anything is how you do everything, and my children have made it so I cannot lie. Not with my body, my words, my energy, my attention. I am not willing to wager their successful development against my absence of capacity, and so, whenever needed — and it is constantly, consistently needed — I go get more.

I anchor into my practices. I lift heavy things. I deepen my breath. I call upon my teachers. I stand in the shower and I pray. Precisely because I have no idea what I’m doing, but I must do it. And so I have no other choice but to plug myself in. Well, I suppose I have myriad other choices., technically. To me, they are not considerable options. Because if I were to make those choices, they would not receive what they need.

More importantly, neither would I. But for far too many years that was not a good enough reason for me to do what actually needed to be done. To stay awake or wake myself back up. But the responsibility of this calling, that I have said yes to, willingly, offers me an ease of awareness around my own alignment that both relaxes/ delights/ amazes me, as well as frustrates/ terrifies/ offends me sometimes.

The difference depends solely on how resourced I am, how resourced I am allowing myself to be. And that is exclusively determined by the story I am telling myself about it. Is this moment for my own Good or is it something unfortunately happening to me? Am I creating a totally unnecessary drama out of something I could absolutely just choose to relax and surrender into? Am I playing out the many-generations-practiced martyr complex that has rooted itself so deeply into the feminine psyche that many of us now mistakenly believe (and behave as if) it is a fixture of our identity?

Because I don’t have to. I simply do not ever have to take the bait. I can always choose a better feeling thought, and I knew that conceptually before becoming a (step)mother. But the training ground/ playground of these relationships have turned that knowledge into invaluable, experiential, somatic wisdom. And that has made all the difference.

But this all works out just fine because I don’t need my brain at all to dance. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true but I’m pretty sure you know what I mean. So happy new moon in Taurus + let’s get into our bodies together this afternoon, shall we?

I’ve got a gorgeous wave of an hour and twenty minute playlist ready to go, and we’ll use the last 10-15 minutes of our time to together to “circle up” and share reflections. I was blown away by the beauty people we’re offering last month… I’m feeling so ready and excited for today.

I’m going to go for a little run by the sea to warm up/ wake up first, so I’ll probably send out the link to join about 30 minutes before we begin. Still time to upgrade to a paid subscription to join us…

See y’all soon!

Yesterday, on my 38th birthday, Ty asked me to marry him… to which I replied, “Obviously!”

We had just finished hiking to the top of a nature preserve on Orcas Island, one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, and somehow I had no idea this was coming until about five minutes before it arrived. He had been planning and designing the ring for months, spoke to my dad back at Christmas, managed to hide the ring from me even during our move earlier this month, and played it cool as a cucumber the entire morning + afternoon.

I was never the kind of girl or woman who spent much time or energy imagining this moment for myself, which I feel quite grateful for now that something better than I ever could have imagined or dreamed has occurred.

Ty custom designed my ring as a team with my oldest friend @chandra.rae, who happens to be the most remarkable jewelry maker (@commonbird_co). He handpicked the diamond, and she handcrafted every single detail — infusing the love and intention of 16 years of friendship into this truly one of a kind heirloom piece. The two emeralds reference a ring I inherited from my mother + my birthstone.

It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, much less owned. I can’t stop staring at it, continually having to remind myself that this is actually real — this life, this love, this dream come true that I have found in this sacred union with the best man I have ever known.

I have lived many versions of many lives throughout my 38 years so far, and I can say with full confidence that there is nothing in this world like the spiritual technology of committed life partnership. And I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else but Ty.

One month ago, we stood together at Crowley’s grave and self-facilitated a handfasting ceremony for ourselves, where we spoke our vows and commitments to ourselves and each other, and when I look at this ring I see it as the manifested reality of the frequencies we devoted ourselves to that day: truth, beauty, intention, presence, self-responsibility, power, connection, abundance, and love.

I love you, Tyler David Dougherty.
It just keeps on getting better.
Brighter and brighter until full dawn.

It’s an absolutely stunning springtime Monday here in northwest Washington. I’m sitting in my downtown office, windows open, listening to the street sounds and the seagulls in symphony with one another outside. The sun is shining, a little early in the season for us (“April showers bring May showers” is how Ty recently told me the sayi…

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From connection to Source, to their own innate, generative, live-giving nature.

From the frequency, disposition, and posture that makes them the most vital, vibrant, resilient, alive, and well.

If, let’s say, they could successfully distract people with tragedy, emergency, cynicism, hopelessness, and judgement from the fundamental Truth of Life — which is that there is always way more going right in the world than wrong — they could completely control those people.

And, meanwhile, those people will pat themselves on the back (from the fetal position on the floor), believing they are integrous, moral, and informed.

And that this is how it feels to be alive.

When the Truth is: they are believing lies — because believing in those lies keeps them locked into the emotional states that feel most comfortable and familiar: frustration, scarcity, powerlessness, resistance, fear… and the most intoxicating and responsibility-avoiding of them all: self-victimization.

When the Truth is: every single living human being has equal access to the same resource, the most valuable and abundant currency in existence: choice.

You can always choose what you give your attention to (in fact, you always are).

You can always choose a better feeling thought about the present moment.

And if, right now, you’re thinking: “Jamie, come on, it’s not that easy”.

You’re actually exactly right.

Because your body, who loves you, is keeping diligent records within their connective tissue system regarding why you needed those emotional states of frustration, scarcity, powerlessness, resistance, fear, and self-victimization in order to survive.

That “in-form-ation” is vital, and it must be regarded (not ignored, suppressed, or shouted down) for lasting change to occur.

So, no, you cannot simply “mind over matter” your way out of the habitual unconscious holding patterns keeping you stuck.

But you can, and you must, learn how to successfully negotiate with your brilliant record-keeping body so they feel safe enough to trust you about where you’re going vs. where you’ve been.

And last night, I finished a 3 month journey of teaching 20 incredible human beings how to do exactly that.

The first round of The Refuge, my new group mentorship program, is officially complete, and the life changes that occurred were profound, unprecedented, and lasting. Permanent.

Because we didn’t just learn new concepts together, we practiced entirely new ways of being; we took different shapes, embodied different dispositions, inhabited different postures — in the presence and witness of other people doing the same thing.

I’ve never done or seen anything like it in my ten years of somatic work.

And I am absolutely positive that I’m doing it again later this year.

Enrollment for The Refuge: A Wild Life Sanctuary for the Human Animal will open again in July, and we’ll get started together in August.

You can join the waitlist here to ensure first access, as spots will be limited.

Secondly, now that I’ve moved through the fog of the past few months, I’m finally doing something I’ve told paid subscribers many times over that I was “just about to do”, which is: conveniently and clearly list out all of the dates for our bi-monthly (zoom) gatherings! So that you can plan accordingly.

Thanks for being patient with me, friends…

Here you go!

Full Moon Calls

These gatherings are a time for us to meet and verbally process together through the themes we’re noticing are individually and collectively emerging in and around our bodies. It’s a space for support, connection, witnessing, encouraging, resourcing, and even sometimes generatively challenging for the purpose of welcomed growth and refinement. I’ve been hosting these calls for six years, and they just keep on getting richer and richer every single month. These calls are recorded and posted for all paid subscribers to view later.

In 2026, we’re meeting on:

May 3

May 31

NO CALL June 28, as I’ll be off-grid in rural BC for the week 🎉

July 26

August 23

September 27

October 25

November 22

December 20

Dark Moon Dances

These dances are a time to let our bodies do the talking. 😉 Throughout the month, I slowly assemble a playlist informed by my own movement sessions and life experiences, and then we consciously and authentically move to it and through it together! You can turn your camera off, lay down the entire time, make “weird” noises, make it as intense as you want it to be… your only job is to let your body tell the truth. After about 75-90 minutes of music and movement, we gather at the end for some debrief and processing, making space for anything your body might want you to share on their behalf. These gatherings are not recorded in order to protect the privacy and authenticity of the space.

In 2026, we’re meeting on:

May 17

June 14

July 12

August 9

September 13

October 11

November 8

December 6

All gatherings happen on Sundays and start at 2pm PST/ 4pm CST, and the links are always sent out to paid subscribers about an hour before we meet. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out in the comments!

It doesn’t have to be, and in fact cannot be, any more complicated than this. And yet, I have such a well-worn habit of making it, needing to make it, so much more complicated than this. But the simplicity of it, of becoming so bored of the bells and whistles that I just sit down and start saying exactly what I mean, exactly how it feels, is the only thing that makes sense. The only way I know how to talk about something this tender, this raw, this real and fundamentally altering.

Something that has initiated me out past a point of no return.

Two years ago, I stated it plain: my friend is dead. And I don’t deny that I was in a very particular kind of grief when I did. It’s true that death had never yet come that close, as close as it did back then. It’s also true that I had not seen or even spoken to that friend in years. Still, I felt it — the reverberations of loss echoing through my suddenly and confusingly hallow body when I found out and for a few days after. But at a distance. Not like this.

Not like this at all.

But that gave me a structure to return to and so I’ll state it plain again: Crowley has been dead for fifteen days. And it’s taken me this long to tell you anything about it because living through it (with full presence) is one thing. Writing about it (with full presence) is another. And I needed sufficient time to recover from the first thing before I could even consider the second — the latter being, luckily and uncomfortably, the only one of the two totally within my “control”.

Here’s what happened — at least what I feel, right now, that I want you to know. I’ll start at the beginning:

It’s December 2019 and I’m a mess, but far from knowing it. I’m actually quite “successful” at being extremely online, and I am running myself raw thinking I know everything, speaking angrily about all of it, and demanding that everyone around me be and do exactly as I desire. I’m three months out of an extremely abusive relationship (head-spinning to look back on now — who was that woman who just kept on staying with that man?), and my anxious attachment was ruling my life. Specifically and most especially in the direction of another man that I had believed for years I was in love with and therefore needed to believe was in love with me too, but just too scared to show it.

So I made a habit out of making myself available and accommodating and definitely the most chill about his avoidant tendencies until he wasn’t looking anymore — which is when I would sob into my tequila in my best friend’s apartment down the hall. “I just want something to love me back”, I cried to her one night. Specifically the night of December 20th. I know it was that night because I adopted Crowley the next day, Winter Solstice, after seeing his perfect face on Petfinder right before I fell asleep, consumed by the absolute knowing, out of nowhere, that he was my cat.

Of course, as I was driving to the shelter the next day, I told myself I was just going to meet him and see. I definitely would not be coming home with a cat. I definitely wasn’t prepared and so I would definitely need some time before making a definite decision.

Two hours later, he was in my apartment. Because the only thing I knew when I sat down on the floor with him in that little room was that my life “before” this little creature was over.

It took me at least a week to land on his name. He came with “Salem” and that was unacceptable. Too obvious for a black cat, but I don’t blame the good people of Middle Tennessee for doing the best they could. My down-the-hall best friend thought to research names of demons from the Bible. We strongly considered Beelzebub (“Bub” for short, of course) (which later became a nickname anyway). I don’t know how or when it happened, but once Crowley emerged as a contender, it was the only choice.

Just like he had always been my cat, that had always been his name.

I was not prepared for so many things: how loud and constant his meow would be, how good it would feel to lay on the floor and look at him instead of my phone, how difficult it would become to imagine what the hell I was even doing with my time and attention before he came along, but most especially: just how perfectly he would reveal myself to me.

For the first two years, all of my patterns and tendencies mostly stayed in place — the only difference was: now there was friction. Now, my nervous system was being mirrored back to me with undeniable clarity. I will never forget the moment I woke up. July 18, 2022. Standing in my living room, looking at his little face as he screamed at me for food, watching and feeling myself become so unreasonably angry at him for being so goddamn fucking honest about… everything.

For letting his body tell the truth about the things that it sometimes just takes a body a long time to forget.

I remember realizing: oh my god, it’s me. I am unreasonably angry at myself, at my body, for telling the truth about the things that it sometimes just takes a body a long time to forget.

It is as ridiculous and inappropriate for me to rage at this cat for the realities held in his animal body as it is for me to rage at mine.

And I truly mean this, in an instant, everything changed. I melted towards him. I melted towards me. I finally let Something love me back.

One month later, Ty appeared. Three months after that, I started massage therapy training and restarted my coaching practice at the same time. I could finally hold presence. I could finally hold peace. I could finally hold love. As a frequency, as a state, in my body. My life started changing because I started changing.

And Crowley? He became my favorite living being. I opened to him and he opened to me. We both became quite attached to one another in ways neither of us ever could have anticipated in the beginning. My teacher in attachment. My companion while writing. My assistant during bodywork. My entertainer, my bedfellow, my comforter, my orientation point, my place to put the best of me.

And eventually, my co-pilot for a 2500 mile move across the country (with Ty too, of course). What a long way we had come and gone together, and what a courageous little creature he was — four days in a car, three nights in different hotel rooms, a new and confusing house with new and confusing beings in it: two boys, a grown man, and a dog. Tenuous at first, eventually he warmed. Even to the dog. But even still, his True North was always me. And as I clumsily adjusted to this enormous life transition, he was mine too. My Familiar in the truest sense. My regulator, my constant, my Home.

In January, we noticed him scratching a lot. The dog, too — fleas, obviously. The vet prescribed a medication. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t think twice about it, but I did. We put it on him anyway. A week later, he was barely eating. There were ups and downs and backs and forths for the next two months, but at a certain point it was no longer plausible for me to believe anything other than the fact that he was dying. The dis-ease spread so quickly — lumps on his neck and under his chin, growing and multiplying, making it increasingly difficult for him to swallow or eat. His boisterous meow disappeared, replaced by a raspy, hoarse, pained whisper. It took him down so fast I can still hardly believe it was real.

What I can, and need, to also tell you though is this: During those same two months, seismic shifts were happening in me. Shifts I was allowing freely. Fears I was facing fully. Choices I was making diligently. I came to understand that I had been sneakily resisting my own initiation into motherhood — and every other identity shift that comes along with it. And during those two months I expanded my capacity and settled debts with myself, and Crowley watched me vigilantly every step of the way. Precisely attuned to my state for over six years, I know he felt the doors closing and opening; know he felt me setting myself free in ways I used to believe I needed someone else to do for me.

And I know he concluded that his mission was complete.

And so, the final act of my initiation was letting him go.

On Thursday, April 2, 2026 at 5pm, peacefully and lovingly surrounded by his family at home, my greatest teacher of my lifetime (so far) took his final breath in my arms. I want to keep the details close and sacred, but what I will share is that we created beauty and ceremony out of loss and pain, and that I offered death my full presence. My undivided and unwavering attention.

And that I got the incredible honor of modeling this approach towards death to my sons. Death greeted with reverence and courage, rather than resistance and fear. This was their first encounter with death in their development, and I took up the mantle of setting the determining tone for them with dignity, resilience, and a peculiar kind of joy, but joy nonetheless.

After he passed, we wrapped his body and drove him out to the magical river land tended and stewarded by a community Elder and dear friend. I held him the entire time. We walked the land together to find the perfect place to lay him to rest. All I knew is that I wanted, he needed, sun. I chose a spot by the river. My friends and family took turns digging. I held him the entire time. When I placed his precious body in the earth, nobody else spoke and all I could say was “thank you” over and over and over and over.

Thank you for cracking me open. Thank you for getting me here. Thank you for showing me who I really am. Thank you for everything.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you.

I love you.

I buried his body with my hands — red, wet dirt caked under my fingernails. The boys knelt down to help. We breathed and grieved together, this precious family of mine. We plated him like a seed — the seed I was always meant to, always inevitably going to, plant here. With them.

The first few days after were brutal, unlike anything I have ever felt before. The grief tangled itself up with guilt, enormous and consuming at first. He was only nine and this did not just come out of nowhere, despite what three different veterinarians said. My body knows better. And it does not do me any good to lie — not to myself and not to you. Crowley died, suddenly, painfully and with much suffering, because of an unexpected adverse reaction to a topical flea medication that I chose to put on his body. And yes, I can withstand the Truth of it, along with all of the sensations that have to have to have to be allowed and felt and danced with and screamed through and eventually, very simply and quietly, released.

Yes I can accept this. All parts of this. Yes I can be that grown and that solid and that honest and that fluid and that raw and that gracious all at the same time. In fact, I have to be.

Otherwise, what was it all even for in the first place?

I am harboring no guilt or regret anymore — I let it all wash through me and do the work that only it could do. I have arrived, again, at surrender to the perfection of all things. And I miss him, terribly. His body, specifically. I feel his spirit everywhere, but my body has ached for his in a way I could never have anticipated. That’s part of it. That’s perfect too.

I don’t know yet who I am without him. I’m living my way into that discovery now. But what I do know is that I currently have access to unprecedented stores of resilience, and that once the inertia of the initial grief lifted, an almost effortless momentum took over. Along with a shockingly precise clarity. And I am doing my best to honor both as the gifts of grace that they are, by using them to the best of my ability.

Just like love, I did not earn them. I simply allowed myself to be broken open enough to be able to receive them. And it is an offering of my abundant gratitude to choose to steward them well.

I am certain that I will write about Crowley for years to come. That he will weave himself in and out of everything I do. And for now, I feel complete in sharing this — somehow both the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever written. I’ll leave you with the poem/ prayer/ spell that poured out of me that July morning, almost four years ago, seconds after I snapped awake to the Work of Love revealing itself to me through my perfectly imperfect animal teacher.

May it be to you as much of a blessing as its Inspiration has been and always will be to me.

All living beings soften and bloom

when their needs are met,

tenderly.

When we stop

withholding out of fear.

When we open ourselves up

to the annihilation of self,

of separateness,

of protection or power

and remember.

Mother, make me a safe place

for reciprocity.

For earth body,

animal body,

all bodies, becoming.

Help me to trust you.

Help me

to trust

me.

Make me listen,

Make me still —

gracious, unguarded, and calm.

So I can remember

to recognize the way it feels

when the world is loving me back.

-written July 18, 2022 at 7:04am

Grief, demanding and consuming, present as a reminder of everything we cannot control or avoid. Most especially: death.

Grief over a tragic and sudden loss that some beloved friends in my Nashville community recently experienced.

Grief over unexpectedly being informed that my cherished (and still quite young) feline companion Crowley has an incurable cancer, and it’s simply a matter of comfort and time.

Grief over watching powerful people I love slip back into fear and illusion, unnecessarily plucking themselves from their place in The Web; from Truth, from Love itself.

Grief over the reverberations that those self-imposed exiles ring out across partnerships, families, communities, and the entire world — hungry and waiting for “the sons and daughters of God to be revealed”.

There was a 72 hour window of time less than a week ago where I could hardly compose myself for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I was a spiraling, weeping mess. And in the most painful moments, I wanted nothing more than to be able to successfully reject the reality of What Is, too uncomfortable to bear (or so it felt, temporarily).

Because it doesn’t feel good, goddamn it, to say “goodbye” or “I’m so sorry” or “how could you” or “wake up, please” or “I’ve done all I can, I guess I’ll leave you to it, then” or sometimes even “I still love you anyway”.

But the truth is: sometimes we have to. If we’re going to be all here, we simply have to do and say and feel those things, with full presence and integrity, whenever the occasion arrives at our door.

And that, my friends, is why we practice.

That is precisely what our practices are for.

To anchor is, fuel us, fortify us in the midst.

Midway through that 72 hour window of mine was Sunday morning — time for church, aka: open floor conscious dance with my community.

My body moved and didn’t, twisted and swirled low to the ground, empty of energy but overflowing with need to purge somehow even still. My fellow dancers, so many of them light on their feet with the energy of the light coming back, the impending arrival of Spring after a long, dark Winter…

I could feel their movement moving me. I could feel their joy reminding me of the inevitability of mine coming back. And maybe even soon. “Just keep going. No feeling is final”.

We gathered in circle at the end and Jenny asked us: “what were you dancing with today?” Amidst the many responses in alignment with the joy and levity, I quietly raised my hand.

“Death.”

I could barely choke it out through my tears. The entire room’s energy gently shifted towards me. Everyone held me in reverence without missing a beat. Nobody moved towards, and nobody moved away either.

The Web simply held it, with me.

The Web simply held me.

We practice so we can meet our lives with full presence. And we practice in community and visibility with one another so we can meet each other with full presence. So we can remember that’s why (and even how) we’re alive in the first place.

So whatever you’re dancing with today, let’s dance it together, shall we?

We’ll gather for our Dark Moon Dance at 2pm PST/ 4pm CST. The link to join will go out to paid subscribers an hour before, so there’s still plenty of time to upgrade if you’re feeling the call/ need/ desire. I am deeply looking forward to seeing you there. ❤️

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Today is my fourth morning waking up in Hawai’i, and I have to tell you that I do finally understand the hype. This is my first time here, and I’ve never been much of a traveler to locations like this. As many of you recently learned in our Heated Rivalry bonus conversation of Experiential Anatomy, the first place I ever traveled to out of the mainland United States was Russia. I lived in Northern England for six month, during the winter, and when I took my life-changing-spiritual-awakening Sabbatical in 2022, I started by spending six weeks in Scotland. In February.

Suffice it to say that I’m not one who is historically much for islands — unless we’re talking about the Hebrides. My ancestors (and God) tend(s) to call me North.

But I said yes to the invitation to come to Hawai’i to help support some of my very dearest Bellingham friends who are hosting a functional medicine retreat in Kona — the one I shared with y’all about a few months ago. My partner Ty and I are are actually here together (what a dream!)… he’s the chef and I’m offering bodywork + providing some logistical support, but mostly I’m luxuriating. I’m not sure I would have ever chosen Hawaii as a vacation destination for myself, but it’s a very popular place for PNWers to go in the winter since it’s so easy to get to. The flight here was about the same length as my flight to Nashville, which blew my mind a little.

I had an uncontainable burst of excitement and overwhelming sensation when we first arrived. The perfectly 73 degree humid air greeted me the second I stepped off the plane — a very sudden thawing out from what was the longest winter of my entire life. I started laughing and yelling and jumping up and down on the tarmac, while wondering why no one else was joining me in letting their body tell the truth...?! We all just flew in from Seattle, for goodness sake. I know you’re enjoying this as much as I am so why not just go ahead and make some weird sounds about it?!

I immediately felt my body in an entirely different reality. And I have to say that Hawai’i as “the United States” is laughable when you really let yourself feel the quality of the land itself, as opposed to the things we’ve built upon it. Which, speaking of, that feeling of “alternative (and preferable) reality” was a bit difficult to get back to after that initial burst because, well, we’re here to host a retreat. We had to go to Costco. I haven’t been to a Costco in twelve years. Is there a more true and honest expression of “America”?

So it took some time once we got to our quiet, secluded palatial plantation house up the mountain for my body to lean all the way back into that feeling of being exactly where I actually am. Every few hours, for the past four days, I have stopped what I’m doing and repeatedly mantra-ed: “I am in the middle of the ocean”. To try and help my body access the feeling of welcomed isolation, disconnection, seclusion, and (therefore) a reorientation towards what actually matters most… this moment. This breath. Right now. Here.

Not my inbox.

Not the endless scroll.

Not the breaking news.

Not the next outrage cycle.

But my body, exactly where she is.

Seeing what she’s seeing. Hearing what she’s hearing. Feeling what she’s feeling.

Knowing what she’s knowing.

There is actually absolutely nothing more important than this.

It took me a couple days of refreshing my inbox for no reason, of scrolling and tapping to find absolutely nothing, to really drop all of the way into the feeling of “I am in the middle of the ocean”.

I am in the middle of the ocean.

My body is currently on a volcano-birthed lava rock tropical island in the middle of the largest ocean on planet earth.

My body is here, right here, all here.

There is actually absolutely nothing more important than this.

Mahalo, Hawai’i. 🙏🏻

I’m so looking forward to reconnecting with a bit of the world outside this little island in the middle of the ocean today during our Full Moon Call at 2pm PST/ 4pm CST! It’s a total Lunar Eclipse in Virgo on Tuesday… let’s explore what that means together! Full Moon Calls are open to all paid subscribers today, and you’ve still got a bit of time to upgrade if you’d like to join us! I’ll be fresh off my first ever snorkel adventure when we meet, so I likely won’t be able to send the email with the info until just before the call. But rest assured, it will arrive! See y’all later today!

Hello lovely friends,

I already sent this via email, but realized immediately after that I wanted it to live more permanently here. It’s been a full and dynamic past few weeks, and I’ve been quieter here than I have been over the past couple of months. Less to immediately share, more to keep close and allow to assemble behind the scenes before offering.

Two weeks ago, I opened the doors of The Refuge to 18 incredible people, and then flew to Nashville (for my 11th residency since I moved away) the very next day. To say that this group container has already been life-changing for me would be both accurate and an understatement. Both in how I’m facilitating/ teaching within it, and also what I am learning through/ because of it. In ten years of creating and offering things publicly, it’s definitely my favorite, and most effective, so far.

I got the most wonderful gift of teaching our opening session from my teacher Christy Lynn’s home in Tennessee — actually, the place where I was in December when the vision + name for The Refuge came through. It felt gorgeously full circle, and she even joined the call to participate and observe (since she + four other of the closest and most respected women in my life are guest teaching in the container). The second the session ended, I sprinted to the other end of the house where she had been joining in on the call from and ecstatically exclaimed, “I did it!!” as she hugged me and told me how proud of me she was of me.

As that was happening, I was holding an acute awareness within myself of just how dark and heavy and defeating my time there in December had felt. And how those sensations and emotions were the exact and perfect soil for inspiration to plant itself within. And how my commitment to my body + my practices of capacity expansion, no matter what, were how I tended and midwifed that inspiration into the manifested reality that was causing me to literally leap and jump with joy in that very moment, only 6 weeks later.

Isn’t that how the Dance of Life always goes, if only we let it?

I am, now + always, acutely aware of the heaviness of the world. And acutely aware of the fact that it’s only going to get heavier. After all, as I find myself saying constantly, the sleep is getting deeper, but more people are waking up. And the fact is: both of those are very difficult, somatically, to 1) compassionately witness, and 2) soverignly enact. Even as we understand and accept that, ultimately, this unstoppable process will inevitably lead to a net positive of more justice, more peace, fewer constructs, less control — in short: a stronger and wider Web. Simultaneously.

As I said to Ty the other day, this collective process, is “not going to feel like nothing”.

This is why we practice. This is why we dance. This is why we move. This is why we partner with the body and even more importantly these days, let the body lead. This is why we let the body lead us into the deepest wisdom that the human experience has to offer us: resilient + courageous expansion into full presence, to meet with eyes and hearts and arms wide open whatever it is that meets us.

Life lately has felt intensely dynamic, and I am continually find my footing in the midst of what is constantly changing within and around me. Just yesterday I received news of a devastating tragedy unfolding in the life of one of my dearest friends, and my body feels liminal today. One foot in excruciating grief, one foot in confusing but unignorable gratitude.

That is what I will be moving with and through today at 2pm PST.

How to hold two distinct and different sensations (and realities) without violently tearing down the middle.

How to dance with both of them and, in doing so, invite them to dance with each other.

How to expand all the way into This, yes This, even This.

How to say Yes to what has already said yes to me.

And I would love to move with and through all of it with you, too. I’ll be sending the link out to paid subscribers about an hour before we begin, so there’s still plenty of time for you to upgrade and join. No matter what, I am offering you love and strength and care… and a final question (for now): what would it feel like to let your body lead, just a little bit more, today?

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